For a monarch whose rule is injurious, and who is deaf to
remonstrance and counsel, killing is no murder.

~ Mencius (c. 300 b.c.)

No offering is more agreeable to God than the blood of a
tyrant.

~ Seneca (c. 50 a.d.)

It is because tyrannicide is closely
connected with the legitimate principles of killing in self-defense,
war, and revolution, that it has been the refuge of every
self-seeking scoundrel in history, that it has been claimed as a
defense by religious zealots, Jacobins, and fascists.

~ Saul S. Friedman (c.
1976)

Contents:

Preface

Tyrannicides

Failed attempts

Borderline cases

Afterword

Bibliography

Preface:

When John Wilkes Booth shouted, "Sic Semper Tyrannis!" ("Thus always
to tyrants!"), he conflated the heroic act of tyrannicide with the
colossal crime of assassination. Similarly, the relentless procession
of assassinations in late Czarist Russia, some of monsters and some
of reformers, and that spawned the ultimate in tyrannical regimes,
has further blurred what is properly a sharp distinction.

In
the five years of 1963-68 - pivotal years of my youth - the United
States and its most sacred democratic ideals were traumatically
damaged by the (arguably unsolved) murders of a complete set of its
most promising and idealistic leaders: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. It is presumed that an unbalanced
individual judged each to be tyrannical, and each was struck down at
the top of his powers, his gifts snatched away, and the ship of
the public weal turned over to crooks, weaklings, and idiots. The
myths of tyrannicide were then used to sweep it all under one very big rug.

Tyrannicides and their sympathizers wonder why is it always the great souls
who are murdered in their prime, and not the sadistic power-addicts
and brutes. One of the Soviet camp-survivors reported a
barracks-mate in the 1950's who cried himself to sleep every night.
Asked the source of his grief, he replies, "In 1926 I rode down in an
elevator alone with Comrade Stalin - with a loaded revolver in my
pocket!"

The
act's extraordinary rarity testifies to the diligence with which
despots keep clear-thinking idealists at arm's length.

What follows is a short survey of a few of the great tyrannicides.
Details are sketchy in the majority of cases, but
each is a great story of heroism and resurgent justice. In addition,
there is a partial catalogue of failed attempts and borderline cases,
and a guide to sources.

Elements of a proper and healthy tyrannicide:

A) The tyrant in question is a real wholesale butcher of
innocents, not merely a brute, bully, or manipulator.

B) The killer has clearly unselfish motives.

C) General conditions (beyond short-term reprisals) show a marked
turn for the better.

(Note: A couple of these cases are weak or murky regarding
conditions (B) or (C), but the strength of the other two criteria
prompts inclusion.)

date
killer
tyrant location

1) 1200 BC Ehud (Aoth)
Eglon
Moab

2) 1100
Jael
Sisara
Israel

3) 1100
(a woman)
Abimelech
Israel

4) 554
Telemachus
Phalaris
Acragas

5) 514
Harmodius
& Aristogeiton Hipparchus
Athens

6) 350
Judith
Holophernes
Judea

7) 41
AD Clemens, Sabinus, et
al Caligula Rome

8) 96
Stephanus
Domitian
Rome

9) 217
Macrinus,
Martialis
Caracalla
Edessa,
Mesopotamia

10) 455
(Aetius'
retainers)
Valentinian
III
Rome

11) 1100
Walter
Tyrell
William
II
New
Forest

12) 1252 Carino of Balsamo Peter of Verona Barlassina

13) 1291
William
Tell
Gessler
Kuessnacht

14) 1476
Lampugnani
& Olgiati
Galeazzo Sforza
Milan

15) 1793
Charlotte
Corday
Jean
Paul Marat
Paris

16) 1878
Sergei
Kravchinsky
Mezentsov
St.
Petersburg

17) 1890
Padlewski
Seliverstov
Paris

18) 1918
(Kronstadt
SR sailor)
von Eichhorn
Kiev

19) 1918
Leonid
Kannegeisser
Moisey Uritsky
Petrograd

20) 1920
Salomon
Teilirian
Talaat Pasha
Berlin

21) 1922
(3
Armenians)
Djemal
Pasha
Tiflis,
Georgia

22) 1926
Sholom
Schwartzbard
Simon
Petlura
Paris

23) 1942
(partisans)
Franz
Stahlecker
Estonia

24) 1942
Gabcik
& Kubis
Reinhard
Heydrich
Prague

25) 1943
Bronek
Pietruszkiewicz
Franz Kutschera
Warsaw

26) 1966
Demitrios
Tsafendas
Henrik
Verwoerd
Pretoria

27) 1989
(5
activists)
Álvarez
Martinez
Tegucigalpa

28) 1997
("a
gunman")
Radovan
Stojicic
Belgrade

1) In 1200 b.c., Ehud, a.k.a. Aoth, the
Benjamite, slew Eglon, the very fat king of Moab who had kept Israel
in bondage 18 years, with a 21-inch (one cubit) double-edged
left-handed sword, speaking the words, "I have a message for you -
from God."

2) Undone by the inspired generalship of the
Joan of Arc-like matriarch Deborah, the forces of Caananite General
Sisara, who'd tyrannized Israel 20 years, were in full retreat when
the general was recognized behind Israeli lines by the virtuous
matron Jael, wife of Abner (or Heber), of whom the Bible says,
"Blessed be she in her tent". She offered him milk - laced with
soporific herbs - and killed him when he passed out. With a hammer
and a tent-peg, to the temple, while he slept. Subject of a painting
by Artemesia Gentileschi (see #6 below).

3) Abimelech, one of the many sons of Gideon,
killed 68 of his brothers to set himself up as king, and was finally
himself killed by a woman who dropped a millstone on his head off a
rampart. While he was staggering around, he got one of his flunkies
to run him through so it couldn't be said he was slain by a
woman.

4) Phalaris, despot of ancient Sicily, had a great
hollow bronze bull, and would roast various of his subjects in it,
for the fun and pleasure of hearing the brazen bull bellow.
Telemachus roasted him in it.

5) Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides tell contrasting
versions of this story. Hipparchus was the son of the celebrated
tyrant Pisistratus. And while some reports say it was Hipparchus'
brother, Hippias, who was killed, possibly as the result of a
gay love-triangle gone wrong, in the aftermath, the two perpetrators
were tortured to death, draconian reprisals were instituted, an
incipient revolt crushed, and the oppressive nature of the regime
intensified. Nevertheless, these two, Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
were celebrated for 2000 years as the classic tyrannicides.

6) She, a virgin, made an assignation with the invading general,
lulled him, in one way or another, to sleep, then beheaded him with
his own sword, gave the head to her maid to carry, and returned home
to great rejoicing. The story is possibly apocryphal, in fact, comes
from one of the 14 unsanctioned books of the Old Testament, the
Apocrypha. It is also the subject of several famous paintings
by Artemisia Gentileschi, proto-feminist Rennaisance painter, and Caravaggio, among others.

7) When Caligula, by every account an utter monster who
took special delight in torturing people to death, was finally killed
by members of his bodyguard (on January 21st, AD 41), they also
killed the rest of his family, including his infant daughter. They
were obviously extra peeved, and a couple had personal axes to grind.
Cornelius Sabinus' wife had been raped by the emperor, and Cassius
Chaerea had been teased within an inch of his life for his high,
effeminate voice.

8) This one is by some assumed to have been committed on behalf of
the emperor's wife Flavia Domitilla, so purity of motive may be
compromised. On the other hand, the Chinese sage Mencius maintains it
is most appropriate that a tyrant be dispatched by a member of his
own suite (cf. Caracalla, the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler, and
what is rumored to be the case with Stalin). Also, the situation in
the country is said to have greatly improved by Domitian's
removal.

9) Caracalla had his brother killed, plus 20,000 of his
brother's supporters and friends. Later he killed thousands of
Alexandrians when there were demonstrations against his visit. He was
also known to have had people executed for urininating in the
vicinity of statues of himself, and, like Stalin, for making
witticisms about him. On the other hand, he was to some degree a
reformer, promulgating, for instance, the law that all free residents
of the Roman empire were to be considered citizens. Marcus Opellius
Macrinus was a prefect in the Praetorian Guards, and became emperor
himself, briefly and fairly harmlessly, upon the completion of his
deed. Macrinus apparently had one of Caracalla's own bodyguards,
Centurian Martialis (whose brother had been a victim) kill him on April 4th, 207, and to add insult to injury, did
so on the emperor's birthday, and while the emperor was on the "throne". Juan de Mariana cited this case and the preceding one in his
famous 1598 defense of tyrannicide that was to fall into discredit
(and to cast odium upon his fellow Jesuits as a whole) in 1610, with
the assassination of French King Henry IV by a lone nut.

10) Aetius was a Roman general whose success at keeping Attila the
Hun at bay made him too popular for the emperor's taste, and so was
"purged". His "barbarian" associates took umbrage.

11) Like Eglon, William the Conqueror's corrupt and incompetent
son and successor, William II, was extremely corpulent. William,
called "Rufus" for his red hair, was killed with a cross-bow in a
hunting "accident" on August 2nd, 1100, by one Walter Tyrrell, who
quickly fled abroad, and from there protested his innocence. There
was rejoicing throughout England.

12) Carino of Balsamo split the the head of Pope Innocent's chief Inquisitor with a heavy blade on April 4th, 1252. For over 20 years, Peter of Verona was the scourge of the Cathars, the gnostic sect that dominated Southern France and Northern Italy in the Middle Ages, precursors of Protestantism and the wellspring of romantic poetry - the troubadors. Central to their beliefs was the complete incompatibility of love and power, hence, as Christians, they opposed the Catholic Church. Peter was a sort of mix of Senator Bilbo, Heinrich Himmler, Joe McCarthy, and Rush Limbaugh: a rabble-rousing apparatchik who presided over the torture-deaths of tens of thousands of the devout - when a Cathar refused to convert, he was "relaxed", i.e., burned alive. Within a year of Peter's excision, he was canonized, the quickest in history, was named the Patron Saint of inquisitors, and thereafter referred to as Peter Martyr and immortalized in scads of devotional art by, among others, Fillipo Lippi, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca. Part of the evidence of Peter's saintliness lay in Church history's claim that Carino, in remorse, converted, and through endless penance became somewhat saintly himself.

13) Gessler was the cruel Austrian governor of Switzerland, who'd
heard of Tell's skill with a crossbow, and so had Tell and his young son delivered to him, and, by threats, made Tell shoot
an apple off the boy's head. Tell, howevver, failed the attitude
test, for when Gessler asked why he'd drawn two bolts from his
quiver, he replied, "The other one was for you if I missed." Until
then, Gessler had claimed to have been going to let him go, but now clapped him in
chains and bundled him aboard ship to sail the length of one of those
long Swiss lakes to where Gessler's castle was. Mid-voyage, a sudden
gale blew up, and as Tell was the only experienced pilot aboard, was
allowed free of his chains so he could save them. Whereupon he
steered close by some rocks, leapt nimbly ashore, and vanished. Later
that day, as Gessler's party arrived at the gates of their castle,
Tell appeared from behind a tree and shot Gessler dead. Since these
events set in motion the founding of the Swiss Confederation, William
Tell is the long-time national hero of Switzerland, but his story is
now thought by scholars to be apocryphal and derived from earlier
Skandinavian traditions. There's a nifty children's book by Mary
& Conrad Buff, The Apple and the
Arrow.

14) The two students' accomplice was Carlo Visconti, from whose
family Sforza had wrested Milan. He and Gian Andrea Lampugnini were
killed by the Duke's bodyguards later that same day, December 26th.
Girolamo Olgiati was tortured to death, and is quoted as saying, "My
death is untimely, my fame eternal." Which suggests at least a
partially selfish motive in addition to serene confidence in the
righteousness of his act. Galeazzo Sforza, incidently, was the father
of proto-feminist warlord Caterina Sforza (cf. Joan Kelly essay, "Did
Women Have a Renaissance?").

15) Marat was a revolutionary theoretician and implacable
denouncer of authority. Goethe and Ben Franklin both endorsed his
critiques of scientific authorities (like Newton). He went from a
medical practice in London's Soho to one in the court of the French
king, to inflammatory journalist, to supreme arbiter of revolutionary
purity. To where, when young Charlotte Corday d'Armont came to his
door, purportedly to rat out some of her home-town (Caen) Girondists
(constitutional moderates), he assured her, "They will soon be
guillotined." When the judge of the revolutionary tribunal that
condemned her asked if she had anything to say, she replied,
"Nothing. Except that I have succeeded." While awaiting execution,
she commissioned her portrait, and was heard to remark, "I long to be
with Brutus in Elysian Fields." She was 24 years old and 5' 1'' tall,
stabbed Marat in his bath. This is also the subject of a very famous
painting, Jacques Louis David's Death of Marat (1793), and a
somewhat less famous painting by Edvard Munch.

16) On August 16th, 1878, Kravchinsky shot and killed the head of
the Russian political police, General Mezentsov, marking, more or
less, the beginning of overtly violent opposition to the czar, the
first of about eight (out of dozens) of killings by radicals that
have elements of tyrannicide, and which, in in this case, spawned a
formal underground organization of intended tyrannicides led,
interestingly enough, by notorious czarist double agent,
EvnoAzev, who made a career of plotting assassinations, then
betraying the perpetrators. This extended orgy of tyrannicides and
assassinations, with the full connivance of police agents, was the
Russian Empire's death-blow, turning everything to chaos and moral
murkiness, and leading quickly, clearly, and directly to the even more
egregious Soviet Empire.

17) Seliverstov was head of the czar's secret police, the
Okhrana.

18) Field Marshall von Eichhorn was commander of the German
occupation of Ukraine. Until July 30th, 1918.

19) The same day as an attempt on Lenin, August 30th, 1918,
another SR student killed his secret police (Cheka) commander,
triggering extensive reprisals. The name is also rendered as
Kunnegisser and Kennegeisser.

20) Talaat Pasha, the former Turkish Grand Vizier and Interior
Minister who presided over the Armenian genocide, was shot in the
head in a public crowd by Salomon Teilirian (Soghomon Tehlirian), a
member of a clandestine wing of the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation, called Nemesis (based in the U.S.), on March 15th, 1921.
Like Sisara, Petlura, and Somoza, Jr., Talaat was out of power when
he was killed, by which time he and his accomplices had been
sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes by a Turkish court, but
under the protection of the same German authorities who had
materially aided in the liquidation of 1,500,000 Armenians. On the
other hand, he was wealthy and his allies in the German Foreign
Ministry were aiding his plans to regain power in Turkey. A German
jury acquitted Teilirian, conferring legal sanction upon his
tyrannicide. There's an excellent book on this story by Edward
Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance.

21) Djemal Pasha, the second member of the three so-called Young
Turks who had ruled the now-dissolved Ottoman Empire, and whose
mission was to rid Turkey of all non-Moslems, was also gunned down by
members of Nemesis (Stepan Dzaghikian, Bedros Der Boghosian, and
Ardashes Kevorkian), on July 22nd, 1922.(The third member of the
ruling clique, Enver Pasha, was killed 2 weeks later fighting with
Afghani guerillas against the Russians. Legend has it that the
Russian soldier who dispatched him also was an Armenian.)

22) Petlura was President of the Ukraine 1918-20, hero of the
"White" armies in the civil war against the "Red" Bolsheviks, and
presided over extensive pogroms against Ukrainian Jews in which as
many as a hundred thousand died. Like Teilirian, Schwartzbard was
essentially acquitted by a sympathetic jury - they judged him
technically guilty and sentenced him to a fine of two francs. In two
ways this was not a pure tyrannicide. First, Petlura apparently did
not direct the pogroms, merely did nothing to stop them. And second,
when Schwartzbard struck, Petlura was well out of power, living in
penury and exile, with no chance of a return. There is a thorough
book about the trial and its background by Saul Friedman,
Pogromchik; and the broader political context, including the
central role of Standard Oil, is lucidly covered in the Imontis'
Violent Justice, which also treats the Grynszpan and
Frankfurter cases (see Afterword).

23) Franz Walther Stahlecker was shot March 24th, 1942 by Estonian
partisans near Leningrad. He was commandant and founder of
Einsatzgruppen A, the northernmost of 3 "mopping-up" brigades that
followed the German Army on the Eastern Front, whose unit alone was
credited with the liquidation of over 200,000, mostly Jews, and was
the first wholesale effort at extermination. There is a famous letter
he wrote apologizing for killing "only" 47,000 Jews at one point.

24) Heydrich's killing, on May 27th, 1942, was orchestrated by the
British to provoke stern reprisals on what they considered the
complacent Czechs - to "stiffen" Czech resistance. Josef Gabcik and
Jan Kubis were young Czech paratroops who, following their successful
ambush of Heydrich, tangled up a full division of German soldiers in
the course of their extended attempts to evade capture. Heydrich, one
of the central architects of the Holocaust, and dubbed "The Butcher
of Czechoslovakia" for his "pacification" (he was partial to
beheadings) of that country's resistance forces, had just been
appointed to "pacify" France when he was killed. France's good
fortune, however, was counterbalanced by the expected harsh Nazi
reprisals in Czechoslovakia. The village of Lidice (population 2000),
Gabcik and Kubis' home town, was completely exterminated, except for
the young women, who were sent to brothels.

25) A lieutenant in the Polish resistance, Pietruszkiewicz, 20,
code-named "Lot", shot and killed Kutschera, 30, SS commandant of
Warsaw who specialized in public mass-executions of civilians, on
February 1st, 1944.

26) Following by 6 years the failed attempt by David Pratt,
Demitrios Tsafendas, a "mulatto passing as white", dispatched the
so-called Architect of Apartheid, Henrik "The Doctor" Verwoerd, with
a knife, on the floor of Parliament in Pretoria, September 6th, 1966.
Tsafendas was acquitted of capital murder by reason of insanity,
legendarily having claimed that his "tapeworm" had told him to do the
deed. He died in the asylum, age 81, in 1999. There is a masterful
biography by his friend, the Dutch historian Henk van Woerden,
Een mond vol glas (Mouthful of Glass in England, The
Assassin in the U.S.)

27) After graduating from the infamous School of the Americas in
1976, Gustavo Alvarez Martinez returned to Honduras and established
Battalion 316, the most deadly of the government-sanctioned death
squads, that specialized in mass-kidnappings, torture, and murder. He
was eventually relieved of his command (at gunpoint) for malfeasance,
and moved to the U.S. where he was awarded a Legion of Merit by the
Reagan administration. Soon after his return to Honduras, in January
of1989, he was shot by five members of the "Popular Liberation
Movement".

28) Radovan "Big Man" Stojicic, 46, was commander of Milosevic's
security police and, among other things, was in charge of arming
Croatian and Bosnian Serbs. He was shot while having coffee in a cafe
with his 16-year-old son on April 11th, 1997.

Failed attempts:

1.
1604 Catesby, Fawkes, et
al James
II London

2. 1658 Edward Sexby
Oliver
Cromwell
London

3.
1809 Friedrich
Staps Napoleon
Vienna

4.
1835 Richard
Lawrence Andrew
Jackson Washington
D.C.

5. 1938 Hans
Oster
Hitler Berlin

6.
1938 Maurice
Bavaud
Hitler Augsburg

7.
1939 Johann Georg
Elser Hitler Munich

8. 1944 Claus
von
Stauffenberg Hitler Rastenburg

9. 1960 David
Pratt Henrik
Verwoerd Johannesburg

10. 1950's 25 Hungarian
teenagers Nikita
Khrushchev Moscow

11. 1972 (anonymous
artist)
Robert
McNamara
Martha's Vineyard

12. 1975 Michel
Goldberg
Klaus
Barbie
Lima

13. 2003 Ahmed Omar
Ali George
W.
Bush Arabia

1. Authors of the "Gunpowder Plot", Guy
Fawkes (the one assigned to set off the powder) and 4 other
conspiritors were caught on November 4th, 1604, before they could
blow up Parliament in protest of the brutal suppression of
Catholics.

2. Sexby was arrested and tortured to
death for publishing Killing No Murder, an argument for
tyrannicide that included a specific call for the assassination of
Cromwell, his former commander, who had ruthlessly suppressed the
"Leveller" movement, activists for communal ownership of agricultural
land.

3. Staps (or Statz) was 18 years old
and was executed in secret.

4. Lawrence thought he was Richard
III, and even the D.A. at his trial, Francis Scott Key (author of the
Star Spangled Banner), agreed with his acquittal due to
incapacity. He died in D.C. General Hospital (where the present
author was once incarcerated) after being imprisoned there 25 years.
When Jackson set out to exterminate the Cherokee (among others), the
Supreme Court endeavored to restrain him. His response: "John
Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." Jackson, our
first genocidal president, invented the strategem of arduous
deportation as a tool of mass murder, setting a precedent for the
20th century's perfection of the technique under the Young Turks,
Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot.

5. Oster was deputy director of german
military intelligence, developed sophisticated conspiracy. See Terry
Parssinen's 2003 "The Oster Conspiracy of 1938.

6. On April 11th, 1938, devout young
Swiss theology student Bavaud was apprehended in an attempt to kill
Hitler, who had him beheaded and, for good measure, banned Schiller's
opera about the legendary tyrannicide William Tell. There's a good
book about Bavaud by Rolf Hochhuth (author of a famous play about the
Pope's accomodations to Hitler) called Tell '38.

7. Elser was a German carpenter and
pacifist who built a bomb hooked up to a clock into a pillar in a
beer-cellar where Hitler was due to appear. It went off, killing
seven people, but after Hitler had already left. Like Bavaud, he was
was extensively tortured before being executed, and subjected to
intense scrutiny by "psychiatrists" in a vain attempt to establish
that he was deranged.

8. This was the famous attempt on
Hitler, and failed because von Stauffenberg's war injuries prevented
him from being able to arm both of the bombs he had in the brief
amount of time available to him.

9. Pratt was a farmer. It was
determined that he was mentally unfit for trial on the basis of statements
on the order of, "I was shooting at the epitome of apartheid."

10. (I wish I had more data about this incident.
Anyone?)

11. On September 29th, 1972, at night and under
the pretext of taking him to a telephone, a 27-year-old artist from
Vermont had Defense Secretary McNamara, architect of 2,000,000
Southeast Asian deaths, halfway over the side of the ferry from the
mainland to the Vineyard, when he had second thoughts. Recounted in
Hendrickson.

12. Goldberg recounts his plot to kill Barbie in
his book Namesake.

13. Ali indicted 2/22/05 for conversations in Saudi
Arabia. Very dubious, as a judge found his claims of torture credible
and evidence against him was largely redacted or anonymous.
Presumably still being held ('07).

Borderline cases:

(the cases below are borderline either due
to straying too far from the above conditions, or because the
available records are sparse, ambiguous, or unreliable.)

1. Presumably, when he brought the palace down,
the Philistine leaders perished with him, but how much more barbaric
they were than he is hard to judge. It has also been argued that
their ill-treatment of him was to some degree a consequence of his
"foolish weakness for Philistine women".

2. Clearchus was the murderous tyrant of
Heraclea, and was brought down by a coalition of 50 of his "allies"
and relatives, including his cousin Chion. Chion and Leonidas, the
leaders of the coalition, had studied under Plato and learned that
philosophers may not just speculate, but must act. Unfortunately,
Clearchus' allies caught all the conspirators, tortured them all to
death, and put all their relatives to the sword. It's reported that
Chion and Leonidas bore their torture with great stoicism. It's also
reported that Clearchus didn't die for 24 hours after he was struck
down, during which period he was tormented by apparitions of many of
those he had murdered.

3. The Emperor of Rome Heliogabalus (a.k.a.
Elagabalus), who seized the empire in a coup from the tyrannicide
Macrinus, was by all accounts Syrian, fanatically Baal-worshiping,
and insane. He was said to have collected all the children of noble
birth and beautiful appearance in Italy for the purpose of torture
and human sacrifice, but there is reason to doubt the story. There is
no doubt, on the other hand, that he was an extreme party
animal, perhaps the most extreme of all time. Antonin Artaud created
an incredible short story, and Louis Couperus an incredible novel,
about him. There is also a short piece on him (as Elagabalus) in
The Big Book of Weirdos by graphic novelist Randy DuBurke, and
an extensive Wikipedia entry.

4. Garcia Moreno ruthlessly suppressed
liberals and democrats and gave the Catholic Church extraordinary
powers. On August 6th,1875 he was killed by Faustino Rayo and
accomplices, but journalist Juan Montalvo was heard to remark, "My
pen killed him."

5. President McKinley was certainly a monster:
his crushing of the Phillipine resistance to U.S. hegemony killed
200,000 civilians, but Czolgosz (who was 28, and apparently
idealistic) didn't kill him for that so much as for general anarchist
principles and for the insanely misplaced theory that his act would
a) put all ruthless capitalist leaders on the defensive, and b)
provide some good press for anarchists (more like the opposite).
Besides, McKinley was more befuddled than ruthless, and his grip on
the wheel of the ship of state not exactly firm.

6. Flamboyantly reactionary Interior Minister
Sipiagin was shot by Balmashev, a student. It was plotted by
double-agent Azev, as were all the major assassinations of Russian
officials (of which there was a total of more than 1500, including
low-ranking soldiers and policemen) between 1902 and 1908, when he
was finally found out. There's a marvellous novel about him by
Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down.

7. Nikolai Bobrikov was the Russian
Governor-General of Finland, in charge of Russification. Shauman was
not a radical, but a relative of Bobrikov's victims, and committed
suicide before he could be taken into custody.

8. Bogoslavsky was the ruthless Russian
governor of the Caucasus.

9. On the 4th of July, 1904, the vicious
reactionary Interior Minister of Russia, Count Viacheslav Von Plehve,
instigator of the notorious Kishinev pogrom among other outrages, was
exploded by a bomb as his carriage rushed through St. Petersburg, by
Yegor Sazonov (a.k.a. Suzasnoff and other variants), a 25-year-old
radical activist, who survived 6 years of beatings in the Tsar's
prisons until committing suicide November 28th, 1910, but not before
lamenting that his act had inspired far less justifiable
assassinations. Von Plehve was succeeded by the Liberal statesman
Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who quickly instituted progressive reforms
and relaxed the censorship.

10. On June 28th, two weeks after the Battleship Potemkin
mutinied at St. Petersburg, members of the Socialist Revolutionary
Party killed the military governor of Moscow, making a bad situation
for the czar worse, and, in historian Michael Florinsky's words,
inviting retaliation.

11. Sergei was Czar Nicholas II's uncle, and well
unloved. He was killed February 17th, 1905, and Kaleyev got away but
was immediately betrayed to the authorities by Azev (who had planned
the attack).

12. Maximovsky, commandant of the central prison, practiced
a policy of regular beatings of political prisoners. Ragozinikova was
20, and she was later to inspireWhittaker Chambers.

13. Dmitri Bogroff, who was a member of a revolutionary
group and also a sometime police spy, killed Prime Minister Stolypin
September 14th, at the opera. Bogroff had been assigned to protect
Stolypin, and when the opera-goers apprehended him, he cried,
laughing maniacally, "Look - I've done my job. I've found the
assassin!" Stolypin's main claims to fame were the "Stolypin
Necklace" - a hangman's noose - and the railway boxcars used to
transport troublemakers en mass to Siberia (used considerably more
extensively by the regime that succeeded his, but they kept the name,
"Stolypin Cars"). By the time he was killed, his ruthless policies
toward the radicals had largely succeeded and he was then under
attack by the right wingers for being too lenient. Many consider him
to have been a great, if failed, reformer.

14. Count Karl von Sturgkh was Prime Minister of Austria, and
an extreme war hawk, and was shot on October 21st, 1916, by Dr.
Friedrich (Fritz) Adler, a renowned writer and editor and son of
psychiatrist and leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party
Victor Adler, yelling, as he did so, "We want peace!". Trotsky
considered Sturgkh more a bureaucrat than a tyrant, even though he
had, in the course of the war, abolished the constitution, set
himself up as dictator, and liberally employed terror tactics against
opposition parties. Adler, a pacifist theoretician increasingly
frustrated by the bloody juggernaut of the Count's prosecution of the
war, astonished all who knew him by his sudden recourse to action. He
was amnestied after 2 years in prison and died in 1960 after a
distinguished career in politics and letters.

15. Wilson was a Member of Parliament and military advisor to the
Ulster government, and promoted flogging and the judicial murder of
500 during the Orange Terror. He was killed June 22nd by IRA
regulars, who were caught and hung. Two weeks later, the IRA
assassinated the Prime Minister of Ireland, Michael Collins, no
monster.

16. Communist partisans killed Mussolini on April 28th, 1945, in
order to forestall any war crimes trial or other accompanying
interference on the part of the allies.

17. Somoza was director of the U.S.-installed National Guard when
he organized the assassination of resistance leader Augusto Cesar
Sandino, and swept himself into power, whereupon he seized most of
the country's land and industry for himself and members of his family
and instituted draconian suppression of any criticism. He was killed
at a union hall dance by a 27-year-old poet on September 21st, 1956,
but his killing achieved nothing but the smooth accession of his
tyrannical sons. Perez, on the other hand, went on to win a newspaper
contest for the best poem eulogizing the dead dictator. As in the
cases of Trujillo and Diem, there are reports of CIA involvement.

18. Trujillo was a beast, hated all over Latin America because of
his clumsy attempt to have President Betancourt of Venezuela killed.
The members of the faction that killed him on May 5th, 1961, seven
leftists with machine-guns whose aim was to seize power for
themselves, were quickly arrested and executed. Although the CIA took
partial credit, always a bad sign, "For once an assassination
presaged a long-overdue period of reform." (McConnell)

19. President Kennedy implied CIA involvement when he quoted
Henry II of England's comment about Thomas a Beckett (right before
his flunkies killed him), "Will no-one free me of this low-born
priest?" The 3 generals who engineered the coup did so in order to
open peace negotiations, but the hawks in Washington and Hanoi
weren't having any, and they were soon deposed.

20. Park was killed October 26th, 1979, by the head of Korean
intelligence (KCIA). Conditions in the country improved
dramatically.

21. Somoza Debayle was Somoza Garcia's son, and carried on his
father's work, having the National Guard thoroughly loot Managua
after the catastrophic earthquake there, embezzling the bulk of the
international relief provided to the earthquake victims, and killing
perhaps 50,000 in the course of surpressing democrats. He was shot
September 17th, 1980, by members of the Argentinian Revolutionary
Workers' party. Having fled Nicaragua in the wake of a mass uprising,
he was a considerable embarassment to Paraguay, and it's widely
believed that the authorities there were complicit in his death.

Afterword:

In
wartime, as with the case of suicide, tyrannicide is considered no
big thing. Of course Bob jumped on that grenade - that's the kind
of guy he was. Of course we fragged the mickey-mouse "lieutenant" -
he was gonna get our asses killed for nothin.

There
are numerous notable instances of idealists violently assaulting
minor functionaries of tyrannical regimes, with consciously symbolic
flourishes and sometimes substantial repercussions. John Brown is a
case in point, as are the notorious cases of Herschel Grynszpan and
David Frankfurter, both of whom shot Nazi bureaucrats (see
bibliography).

There have
been countless cases of non-violent tyrannicides, where some
civic David has legally brought down some despotic Goliath. 3
examples from our own era: The lawyer Joseph Welch bringing down
Senator Joe McCarthy in celebrated Congressional hearings (1954).
Senator Sam Ervin bringing down Richard Nixon in celebrated Senate
hearings (1974). And lawyer (later Federal Judge) William Dwyer
bringing down the rabid right-wing witch-hunters Ashley Holden and Al
Canwell of Washinton State in a celebrated trial (1964) and a
riveting book recounting the trial, The Goldmark Case
(1984).

Finally,
there are the wholly non-violenttyrannicides (legal
sanctions are maybe only partly non-violent?), whose compassion
compels them to murder institutions rather than individuals: Rosa
Parks, Gandhi, Jesus. And, if truth be known, many tens of thousands
more, of similar legacy, if lesser fame.